


Golden Age of Radio

by Indybaggins



Category: Whose Line Is It Anyway? RPF
Genre: Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-26
Updated: 2011-12-26
Packaged: 2018-01-10 03:34:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1154315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Indybaggins/pseuds/Indybaggins
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A history of Richard: the people he fell in love with, the ideas he loves still, and the friend that could be something different.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Golden Age of Radio

**Author's Note:**

> Secret Santa for jie_jie!
> 
>  
> 
> [](http://smg.photobucket.com/user/indybaggins/media/18bestbritline2011_zpsfb8865fe.png.html)  
>   
> [](http://smg.photobucket.com/user/indybaggins/media/20bestother2011_zps1079c9f1.png.html)  
> 

 

It’s funny, that most people recognize Richard’s face and don’t know his voice. 

He has spent years on Whose Line, happy ones too, but in all that time he’s barely spoken ten words on camera. He has done plenty of others things, much more important things, yet Whose Line is what people tend to remember him by. And it was pleasant enough, he thinks, to improvise in his own way, to play whatever instrument the scene needed him to. But it was agonizing as well, sometimes, because he knew that he could have played the actual scene. Not as good as some of the regulars, perhaps. But at least as good as most as the guests. 

The thing is, he knows the rules of improv. He (as opposed to most of the people in the business) has actually read the books, followed and then taught the courses. The Keith Johnstone method. Viola Spolin. He knows the history of all the Second Cities, the Groundlings, the Comedy Store (mostly because he’s been there for all of it). He’s been in the audience more times than the people around him have been on stage, he has performed in basements, empty bars and squatted houses, has been an understudy and a stand-in more times than he can count. He can tell when someone is about to break the fourth wall. He knows who treads on another performer’s toes. Who is made for stand-up, but not improv. He’s researched and carefully watched and got up on a stage himself for the first time when he was eleven (and wasn’t very good). He couldn’t decide for the longest time whether to focus on music, or research in physics, or improv. So Richard, young and too intelligent for his own good, decided he would excel in all three. 

And in the end he did well enough in all of them, but maybe not as great as he had hoped for, he thinks. 

 

He made out with Stephen Fry once when he was twenty, at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1979. Stephen was two years older than him and by that right, much more interesting, verbose and inherently sexy. They kissed behind the main tent, until Richard’s face was flushed, knees trembling, and Stephen left him there, hard-on and all, when he was called onto the stage. They never got beyond random acquaintances after that, but every time he sees Stephen still, and he does, regularly, at fund raisers, events, comedy shows or television tapings, he always remembers. 

He fell hard and fast for Tony in ’81, and they joined up to tour the nation. The sex was exceptional, Tony being the most intense person he knows, everything just a tad dirty and raw. He remembers mainly beers, so many beers, foam slicking his lips, and nights yelling and singing and playing in dark, smoke-filled pubs, until his voice was gone, throat sore, the edges of his mouth painful from smiling and later, from deep-throating a stoned-out-of-his-mind Tony.

He got a PhD in Physics, and taught at St. John’s for a full school year. The Uncertainty Principle, special relativity, quantum mechanics, electrostatics. They’re all beautiful in their own way, and he likes to grasp the edges of them with his mind, flirt with the ideas. Even more so, he likes them because they, inherently, hold the possibility to dream incredible dreams. People often think science is static, rules and formulas and test tubes. In physics, it’s the opposite. It’s exciting, daring, every new paper pushing the world’s understanding of itself, and, for those who understand it, that kind of challenge is addictive. Tony never got that, tried to distract him with wild promises of sex and stages, fame and smokes while Richard was drinking another coffee, bitter, just to stay awake enough to read. They broke up when one day Richard came home and found Tony, high and explosively angry, burning his textbooks. 

He dates Josie in the Whose Line era for a while, more because he admires her than that he loves her. She likes it when he plays the piano and sings to her, makes up nonsense songs about her hair, her lips, her breasts, some funny, most intimate. She’d always known that he used to be with Tony, and said she didn’t mind, but in the end, a good two years later, Richard thinks that maybe, she had expected him to be someone more exciting than he really is because of it. It ends when he tries to kiss her and she turns her head away. 

He goes back to Tony, for a punishing week or two, (hard, familiar, wrong) and only realizes what he’s doing to the man when Tony tries to OD again. After that he sticks to visiting him in rehab and psychiatric facilities and reading to him. Wilde, Austen, Neruda, Tony isn’t picky and Richard likes the sound of his own voice and the way Tony pretends not to pay attention, but tears up at the sad parts. 

His heart stays celibate for years after that. He has a strong thing, fondness maybe, for Clive that is so fragile and sort of private that he never dares to act on it. His dicks strays, sure, sometimes women, mostly men. He makes a point out of never sleeping with anyone within the extended Whose Line family, because it is too incestuous as it is and he likes to get along with people, maybe even more so than he wants to love them. 

Josie and Tony date (or fuck, more likely) for maybe a week, and then both separately confide in him that they truly can’t stand the other and can’t image how he spent years with him/her. 

He does a TV-show, radio shows, he narrates documentaries, sits in on game shows, and always, always the comedy festivals. He performs everywhere from Jerusalem to Mexico City, Montreal to New Delhi. He writes more physics papers, and continues researching. He joins an all-male nude dance group before it’s popular. He lives, and lives, and lives as if there is never time enough in the world to see and feel and hear and do it all. He is convinced he will die young. 

Then somewhere in the early two thousands he stumbles into a kiss with Jim, who, more than slow him down, sort of carefully, warmly settles around him and tells him to breathe every once in a while. He’s there when Jim needs to buy his first cane. He’s there to give him a strong arm to lean on, to pull him in and out of the bath. He’s ready for more of it, too, a different kind of challenge, when Jim tells him “I can’t do this to you,” and dumps him unceremoniously on the London subway after only a year. 

Then Richard is single again and it’s a lot more lonely than he remembers it. He spends a lot of time wishing that Jim _would_ have done this to him, instead of finding a girlfriend and leaning on her. His heart stutters the first time he sees him in a wheelchair though, and with the years, he has to admit that he was right. He couldn’t have done it. He’s there for Jim’s last performance in the Comedy Store in 2008 and feels old. Josie has streaks of grey in her hair now. His own is still wild, mad professor style, but thinning slowly. Clive, Paul, even Tony and himself, they’ve all become older men. Not old yet, or not too old, at least. But he gives it maybe a year or ten. Before one of them breaks a hip, and goes. Another retires and it becomes ridiculous, to be out there on that stage. He’s terrified of that day. 

He runs into Stephen the next morning in a hallway of the BBC, and boldly asks him whether he remembers, that one day behind the tent at Fringe thirty years ago. Stephen laughs heartily and tells him he does, and they have a drink together. While five years earlier he still would have slept with the man, now they just drink, reminisce and go their separate ways. 

He doesn’t know if he’s growing old or growing up, whether he’s too scared or not nearly scared enough. 

 

Then Greg comes by that winter and something is different. He’s known Greg for nineteen years. He’s seen him get married to a kick-ass woman simply out of friendship (and envies even that, now). Be in love desperately, obsessively with Ryan for years on end (something that, as far as Richard knows, was never –besides a night or two- returned). Known him to be smart, dark, cynical and genuinely good, all at the same time. A close friend, all that time, but never more. 

And now they’re sitting side by side at the Comedy Store bar, and it’s late, so late that the chairs have been turned over and the barman is wiping the counter for the fifth time, the music has been turned down along with the lights. And there is something achingly familiar in Greg’s eyes. The slope of his shoulders. His will to go on and his brilliance, the quick cadence of his words along with the lazy press of his warm fingers against Richard’s elbow while he’s trying to make a point and Richard thinks that maybe, he’s been trying to find the wrong guy all along. 

Greg follows him home as if they’ve agreed on it earlier, kicks his shoes off to show bright purple socks and lounges in his sofa with the ease of an old friend, which he is. It’s only the expectation in his eyes that’s different. Richard kisses him, and opens his jeans and blows him, and it’s surprisingly wonderful. Greg is obviously comfortable here, and Richard is as well, and neither of them is nervous because somewhere in that first kiss he’s decided that if they fuck this up, Greg is the kind to allow a do-over. 

But the best part, afterwards, is how Greg, stark naked but for the socks, wanders over to his desk, and asks him about the formulas behind his most recent paper. Richard, half-dressed himself, picks up his guitar and strums it unselfconsciously while he answers, the accords underlining the thought lines on Greg’s forehead when he asks about the theory behind multiple universes. 

How Greg inspects his book collection, and gets really excited about his old, leather-bound copy of Faust he found at the Nothing Hill market last month and treats it carefully. 

How Greg never puts his shoes on again, instead sleeps over in Richard’s bed, and holds on to him through the night, a warm, steady weight behind him.

 

 

 

 


End file.
